Adele Donovan dives into the blue in this gorgeous CNF hybrid, taking her illustrator to new depths.
Writing by Adele Donovan
Art by Katy Somerville

Interaction of Color
1. Steve explains that lapis is much easier to get ahold of now than it was back then, and rambles on about the Silk Road, and tells a funny story how Michelangelo could only envision women as men with breasts because he was gay. Michelangelo is my kind of man. All jokes aside, I try and picture myself in five years as a model, nude on a pedestal, struggling to hold up a papier-mâché object heavy with symbolism. Five centuries from now, my likeness in marble will be a jolly good laugh.
2. When I was a little boy, my father got me a book with pictures of marine animals. I couldn’t help but think the water had no right to be blue in the ocean when it was clear in my cup. You can’t be expected to recite a Hail Mary with a straight face when the Holy Virgin Mother is just some dude with tits. I guess you can’t be one of the guys when God gets you pregnant.
3. I’m sick of schadenfreude. The Albers were sick of schadenfreude. They brought their blues to a black mountain when the Gestapo pushed all the color out of the Bauhaus. Ziegler must have had the crowd splitting their sides at all that aesthetic impotence. Speaking biologically, degenerate art is just art that inches closer to unification. There are precisely three ways for us stunted humans to bear witness, and blue is one of them.
4. When I was yesteryear old, Josef told me that all color was relative. He wanted me to understand blue through the eyes of its neighbors. Michelangelo’s Last Judgment is only as blue as the chapel wants me to think it is. North Carolina’s flag is only as blue as the sound of a pact signed between its red, white, and yellow. The ocean isn’t blue at all. The ocean doesn’t have any friends. It’s easy to chuckle at the shifting shades of Adam’s apple as he peeks from the garish neckline of the next dress.
@adele_donovan_writes_stuff.
About the Author
Adele Donovan is a Seattle-based trans writer. A graduate of the University of Iowa’s Between the Lines program, her work has appeared in Hiatus Magazine and Ice Lolly Review, and she is the author of two chapbooks, Ballads of Summer (2020) and Awaiting Great Fires (2021). She is a co-host of the Intersecting Lines podcast. Donovan explores themes of faith, nature, gender, love, art, cyclical rhythms, and change in her work.
About the Artist
Katy Somerville was beamed into existence on a Monday night in the mid-eighties by stars, glitter, and a glorious Italian woman from a long line of very strong women. In the present timeline, she likes to drink coffee, pat any animal that will engage with her, make collages, and spend time laughing and finding moments of joy wherever she can with her partner and her goofy, lanky dog.
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